| #### Chapter 7 |

| #### #### But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessarily comport the existence of a Principle of Evil? Is it because the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this All is made up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is blended from the Intellectual-Principle and Necessity: what comes into it from God is good; evil is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form. #### But, since the expression "this place" must be taken to mean the All, how explain the words "mortal nature"? #### The answer is in the passage [in which the Father of Gods addresses the Divinities of the lower sphere], "Since you possess only a derivative being, you are not immortals... but by my power you shall escape dissolution." #### The escape, we read, is not a matter of place, but of acquiring virtue, of disengaging the self from the body; this is the escape from Matter. Plato explains somewhere how a man frees himself and how he remains bound; and the phrase "to live among the gods" means to live among the Intelligible-Existents, for these are the Immortals. #### There is another consideration establishing the necessary existence of Evil. #### Given that The Good is not the only existent thing, it is inevitable that, by the outgoing from it or, if the phrase be preferred, the continuous down-going or away-going from it, there should be produced a Last, something after which nothing more can be produced: this will be Evil. #### As necessarily as there is Something after the First, so necessarily there is a Last: this Last is Matter, the thing which has no residue of good in it: here is the necessity of Evil. ####  |